Well, whaddya know? Girls can be total perv-monkeys too.
Not that this is any kind of secret. In a risqué (but sadly, not risky) way, B Gata H Kei attempts to dispel the illusion that anyone possibly has about things like, "Girls never think about sex!"
Girls are human. That means they're animals. And nobody seems to be a bigger predator or dog in heat than Yamada, a girl so pervtastically fun that she has her own ero-gami (sex god) delusion encouraging her to go get 'em, tiger! "Them", of course, refers to guys. Not two or three or even ten. About one hundred to be exact.
Tired of being an obsessed virgin insecure about her body sexually, she embarks on her journey to be an intercourse artist, an ero pro, a sexpert, an all-rounded base-rounder-- you get the idea. As they say, every journey begins with the first step, so naturally Yamada needs to score her first guy. Just not any guy, of course. He has to be her experiment, someone she can just use and throw away afterwards like a condom, someone who wouldn't realise that Yamada herself might suck at sex because he would obviously be worse at it than she is. So her sights are set on Kosuda; a boy so average and unnoticeable, shy and insecure that he must be suffering from a worse case of Virgin-itis than Yamada. Who better to pop your cherry than a cherry-boy?
It's tremendously obvious from the start just what is going to happen to Yamada's goal of laying 100 guys. Hell, she probably wouldn't even be able to do it with 10 guys without garnering hatred from the audience for being a "slut". So instead of being the kind of anime that could really analyse things such as sexual double standards and expectations, budding sexuality and gendered attitudes to sex, this title instead tries the more light-hearted but audience-friendly approach. Essentially what you get is a story quite like any other ecchi one... just this particular series focuses on a girl's take on it.
Sexual frustration? Age gap love affairs? Incestuous love for a sibling? Public indecency? It seems B Gata H Kei gave itself a pep talk: Let's blow it up and go over the top! To handle such controversial or scandalous material, the anime makes sure to do it all so heavy-handedly that not for a minute would it be subject to actual deeper regard. Despite living in an era where teen sex proves quite popular (amongst teens and for older others), some folks reveal themselves to be quite conservative. As far as anime goes, it's now okay to over-sexualise everything and have the characters just shy of doing it, but notice how they never seem to actually... do it. Sex has always been a fetish, though lately the route many mainstream anime have taken debunks any ideas that a girl will be "unpure" by having or having had intercourse. It's okay to show a girl having her boobs groped or landing crotch-first into the face of a guy she's interested in. But have sex with him? Or any other guy prior? No way.
The only characters who seem to actually have sex at all in anime and manga are ones from series for older, mature audiences. No, I'm not talking about hentai. What is being referred to are seinen and josei titles in particular, or indie and arthouse productions. And how well do these titles fare...? The truth is that series are governed by their audiences. You may wonder what the point of this lesson is about, but it leads into why exactly B Gata H Kei is such a different kind of anime, but at the same time, it so disappointingly "follows the rules" as to not alienate its key audience that it's just like the others.
As much as the story extends in turning the conventions of ecchi on their heads, it still adheres to the same-old, same-old rules and plods through the typical events and service set-ups: accidental boob-groping, competition from other girls, tons of misunderstandings and fanservice. What the story boils down to is an attractive girl falling for an average brown-haired loser with a heart of gold. When has THAT never happened before? Think about it this way-- this is just a regular ecchi rom-com... told from the perspective of the girl in the harem who eventually "wins", and not from the perspective of the guy. Just instead of having a bevy of girls actively pursue Kosuda, the rest of the females are rivals in other senses. Thankfully, this is not harem and in its sincerest moments, tries just to be a story about a boy and girl without too much outside interference. The biggest obstacles are Yamada and Kosuda themselves.
A lot of it is cute whenever it isn't being a faithful servant to its genre. Watching two totally dorky and incompetent people try to work through the stages of a relationship is absolutely fun and a bit touching. In many (slightly skanky) ways, it works through the levels of deepening emotional and physical bonds between two people. Some moments end up making you smile or actually get your heart pounding because you're so invested in what's happening between the characters. Drunken collegiate humour aside, much of it is sweet. Still, it's hard to think of this as something romantic since not wearing underwear in school, fooling around on your friend's bed and going to love hotels don't exactly scream "classy".
While on the topic of "classy", the anime seems to downplay the use of fanservice as much as it uses it. Curiously, the fanservice does not arise out of the sexual situations but things surrounding them. Some of Yamada's getups to try to turn Kosuda on pretty much scream "service" but funny enough, animating her getting naked or him having an erection does not have the same effect. These instances are not for titillation of us only, but are done for the characters too. As for the animation on the whole, B Gata H Kei does not boast smooth movements or a very attractive art style. It looks average at best. It sounds a lot better, though.
While the theme songs might be stuff to enjoy out of personal taste, the background music is a medley of fun, energetic tracks and some emotionally stirring pieces for the show's more serious moments. What steals most of the attention however is the voice acting. This series has just about a huge cast of famous seiyuu, some notably playing roles quite different from what they are used to, others fitting in quite exactly into the types you expect. Noto Mamiko definitely has one of her most unusual roles here. She does not play the quiet girl or the shy one. Instead she acts as Kosuda's boisterous, raunchy sister. Where did her traditional elegant whisper of a voice go? Humorously out the window. But for every instance of hilarious seiyuu-role-swapping, you get stereotyping as well. Hanazawa Kana plays exactly that innocent, sugary sweet type she's pretty much typecast into performing now. The main attraction is Tamura Yukari who plays Yamada. While her voice may be too high-pitched for some, the level of control she exudes for her role is quite commendable. She really makes Yamada... Yamada.
While on our protagonist, it must be noted that she is one of the very few and rare female leads of an ecchi. It's far too often that girls are the main focus of ecchi anime, but it's not quite as common for them to adopt the role of main protagonist or in this case, lecherous wolf. Without her, B Gata H Kei's comedy just might not work. She's just a total bundle of fun and she pretty much voices what a lot of guys and girls alike might be thinking were they the single-minded sort. Yamada is the kind of girl who gets jealous whenever she finds out someone else is getting laid more than she is-- when have you ever met a girl like this in anime?
Kosuda is a genuine and normal guy (and not a total scumbag or gross old man on the inside). As aggressive as Yamada is in pursuing this guy for sex, she always ends up in the more submissive positions any way. Again, catering exactly to what the typical ecchi audience wants. Despite that, Kosuda still manages to be a pretty nice guy. That kind of makes Yamada's use of him both sleazy and exploitative, but when she starts falling in love with him, it makes a lot of sense. He might not be handsome and he's totally awkward, but the nice guy prevails. The only problem with him is that frustrating inconsistency in his development. He can touch a girl's chest and stick his tongue down her throat, but he is dead-scared of saying he likes her? That's just dumb.
The rest of the cast are so totally pointless that it makes one wonder why they get any screen time at all. They serve as foils in various regards, but their importance to the audience and even to Yamada herself is so minuscule that it makes the viewer wonder what's the point in her even having friends. There's the typical supportive best friend, the evil ojou-sama, the nice girl, the cool older sister, the more mature younger sister, and the two filler guys who always show up to occupy the classroom scenes. Most of them exist to be roadblocks or green lights for Yamada and Kosuda, but again, their interference remains quite insignificant in the larger scheme of things that it seems arbitrary and pointless that they even try. The ero-gami (Yamada's sex god and Kosuda's... penis pundit) however, totally capture a viewer's attention and have some of the best lines in the series.
B Gata H Kei had the potential to just blow what people perceive about girls who want to have sex out of the water... but it's still written for a male audience. It might be a stretch asking for an ecchi anime to try to be different, but considering that this series went so far as to even have a female protagonist who is the perv, then why stop there? For every two steps it marches forward, it seems like it's pushed one step back. The romantic dilemmas just end up being frustrating. The sexual problems, however, end up being hilarious, and that is the second saving grace of the series. The first being its unsuccessful attempts to be totally different from what one normally sees.
I mentioned earlier that B Gata H Kei was risqué, but not risky, and there's a reason for that. For all it does in trying to push the envelope, it seems dead scared of really trying to be dissimilar from other ecchi series. To be truly risky, the anime should have dealt with Yamada and Kosuda's budding sexuality in less of a "Haha, but it's a joke, see? Not to worry!" manner. The slapstick and light-heartedness is fine, in fact, it is more than welcome. Yet considering the subject matter, if this was handled differently it could have been a seriously good and insightful (not to mention, true-to-life) depiction about how teenagers deal with sex. It doesn't so much walk across hot coals taking solid steps as it guns right across them on tiptoes. Think about that for a minute.
It COULD have been a great romantic-comedy series about a guy and a girl who want to have sex with one another just absolutely failing or messing up. Their differences in temperaments and personalities and their similarities in being totally incompetent and insecure would have made for excellent conflict chemistry. But all that it "could have been" aside, the anime manages to be amusing and sometimes dead hilarious at points. As far as ecchi goes, it pushes boundaries but does not quite cross them.
Unless this is your first ecchi anime, then the kind of situations are just so commonplace that they can barely count as extraordinarily different (except whenever Kosuda gets boners. Also, a handful of the cast are admittedly non-virgins-- that's something you rarely see talked about in these kinds of anime as well). It just is a bit different since the protagonist is a girl, and not a guy, and the aim of said protagonist is to get laid (and funny enough, despite most anime being hyper-sexual, they never seem to properly address the issue of actual sex at all).
When the story is just being itself, it manages to be very funny. Girls talking about losing their virginities or imagining that what guys do in a bathhouse is compare dick sizes-- that sort of thing makes the series just work well, because it takes such a open, direct attitude towards sex and sexuality. Teenage boys and girls are sexually active or (woefully to most of them) inactive-- there's no getting around that or hiding it. Their "troubles" and concerns over their sex lives at that point in time is something the anime attempts to cover, and when it does, it does it well, with comic tones and good humour. It's when it slips back into being a typical ecchi rom-com that it disappoints. It isn't unfunny. It's just so disappointing that you cannot really enjoy it completely as it had the potential to comically address an issue that is never really dealt with in anime: female sexuality. Well, you may be disappointed if you're a viewer expecting something more from this series. If you just want mind-in-the-gutter jokes and a romping good time, you can get that too.
For anyone who watches this and actually thinks for a bit, all this show mostly serves to do is point out a ton of double standards in not only the anime world, but the real one as well. While watching it, I couldn't help but wonder how this series would be regarded if it really was about Yamada just using Kosuda to fulfil her goal. It's not acceptable if a girl wants to be horny and do it with whatever guy or however many guys she wants. It's totally okay if she is a total horndog over one guy, though. Still, as far as leads go, Yamada still makes one refreshing exception to the norm, and as far as ecchi goes, B Gata H Kei bends and plays with the conventional without ever breaking away from it.
Then again, what am I talking about-- nobody watches ecchi and THINKS about it.
Not that this is any kind of secret. In a risqué (but sadly, not risky) way, B Gata H Kei attempts to dispel the illusion that anyone possibly has about things like, "Girls never think about sex!"
Girls are human. That means they're animals. And nobody seems to be a bigger predator or dog in heat than Yamada, a girl so pervtastically fun that she has her own ero-gami (sex god) delusion encouraging her to go get 'em, tiger! "Them", of course, refers to guys. Not two or three or even ten. About one hundred to be exact.
Tired of being an obsessed virgin insecure about her body sexually, she embarks on her journey to be an intercourse artist, an ero pro, a sexpert, an all-rounded base-rounder-- you get the idea. As they say, every journey begins with the first step, so naturally Yamada needs to score her first guy. Just not any guy, of course. He has to be her experiment, someone she can just use and throw away afterwards like a condom, someone who wouldn't realise that Yamada herself might suck at sex because he would obviously be worse at it than she is. So her sights are set on Kosuda; a boy so average and unnoticeable, shy and insecure that he must be suffering from a worse case of Virgin-itis than Yamada. Who better to pop your cherry than a cherry-boy?
It's tremendously obvious from the start just what is going to happen to Yamada's goal of laying 100 guys. Hell, she probably wouldn't even be able to do it with 10 guys without garnering hatred from the audience for being a "slut". So instead of being the kind of anime that could really analyse things such as sexual double standards and expectations, budding sexuality and gendered attitudes to sex, this title instead tries the more light-hearted but audience-friendly approach. Essentially what you get is a story quite like any other ecchi one... just this particular series focuses on a girl's take on it.
Sexual frustration? Age gap love affairs? Incestuous love for a sibling? Public indecency? It seems B Gata H Kei gave itself a pep talk: Let's blow it up and go over the top! To handle such controversial or scandalous material, the anime makes sure to do it all so heavy-handedly that not for a minute would it be subject to actual deeper regard. Despite living in an era where teen sex proves quite popular (amongst teens and for older others), some folks reveal themselves to be quite conservative. As far as anime goes, it's now okay to over-sexualise everything and have the characters just shy of doing it, but notice how they never seem to actually... do it. Sex has always been a fetish, though lately the route many mainstream anime have taken debunks any ideas that a girl will be "unpure" by having or having had intercourse. It's okay to show a girl having her boobs groped or landing crotch-first into the face of a guy she's interested in. But have sex with him? Or any other guy prior? No way.
The only characters who seem to actually have sex at all in anime and manga are ones from series for older, mature audiences. No, I'm not talking about hentai. What is being referred to are seinen and josei titles in particular, or indie and arthouse productions. And how well do these titles fare...? The truth is that series are governed by their audiences. You may wonder what the point of this lesson is about, but it leads into why exactly B Gata H Kei is such a different kind of anime, but at the same time, it so disappointingly "follows the rules" as to not alienate its key audience that it's just like the others.
As much as the story extends in turning the conventions of ecchi on their heads, it still adheres to the same-old, same-old rules and plods through the typical events and service set-ups: accidental boob-groping, competition from other girls, tons of misunderstandings and fanservice. What the story boils down to is an attractive girl falling for an average brown-haired loser with a heart of gold. When has THAT never happened before? Think about it this way-- this is just a regular ecchi rom-com... told from the perspective of the girl in the harem who eventually "wins", and not from the perspective of the guy. Just instead of having a bevy of girls actively pursue Kosuda, the rest of the females are rivals in other senses. Thankfully, this is not harem and in its sincerest moments, tries just to be a story about a boy and girl without too much outside interference. The biggest obstacles are Yamada and Kosuda themselves.
A lot of it is cute whenever it isn't being a faithful servant to its genre. Watching two totally dorky and incompetent people try to work through the stages of a relationship is absolutely fun and a bit touching. In many (slightly skanky) ways, it works through the levels of deepening emotional and physical bonds between two people. Some moments end up making you smile or actually get your heart pounding because you're so invested in what's happening between the characters. Drunken collegiate humour aside, much of it is sweet. Still, it's hard to think of this as something romantic since not wearing underwear in school, fooling around on your friend's bed and going to love hotels don't exactly scream "classy".
While on the topic of "classy", the anime seems to downplay the use of fanservice as much as it uses it. Curiously, the fanservice does not arise out of the sexual situations but things surrounding them. Some of Yamada's getups to try to turn Kosuda on pretty much scream "service" but funny enough, animating her getting naked or him having an erection does not have the same effect. These instances are not for titillation of us only, but are done for the characters too. As for the animation on the whole, B Gata H Kei does not boast smooth movements or a very attractive art style. It looks average at best. It sounds a lot better, though.
While the theme songs might be stuff to enjoy out of personal taste, the background music is a medley of fun, energetic tracks and some emotionally stirring pieces for the show's more serious moments. What steals most of the attention however is the voice acting. This series has just about a huge cast of famous seiyuu, some notably playing roles quite different from what they are used to, others fitting in quite exactly into the types you expect. Noto Mamiko definitely has one of her most unusual roles here. She does not play the quiet girl or the shy one. Instead she acts as Kosuda's boisterous, raunchy sister. Where did her traditional elegant whisper of a voice go? Humorously out the window. But for every instance of hilarious seiyuu-role-swapping, you get stereotyping as well. Hanazawa Kana plays exactly that innocent, sugary sweet type she's pretty much typecast into performing now. The main attraction is Tamura Yukari who plays Yamada. While her voice may be too high-pitched for some, the level of control she exudes for her role is quite commendable. She really makes Yamada... Yamada.
While on our protagonist, it must be noted that she is one of the very few and rare female leads of an ecchi. It's far too often that girls are the main focus of ecchi anime, but it's not quite as common for them to adopt the role of main protagonist or in this case, lecherous wolf. Without her, B Gata H Kei's comedy just might not work. She's just a total bundle of fun and she pretty much voices what a lot of guys and girls alike might be thinking were they the single-minded sort. Yamada is the kind of girl who gets jealous whenever she finds out someone else is getting laid more than she is-- when have you ever met a girl like this in anime?
Kosuda is a genuine and normal guy (and not a total scumbag or gross old man on the inside). As aggressive as Yamada is in pursuing this guy for sex, she always ends up in the more submissive positions any way. Again, catering exactly to what the typical ecchi audience wants. Despite that, Kosuda still manages to be a pretty nice guy. That kind of makes Yamada's use of him both sleazy and exploitative, but when she starts falling in love with him, it makes a lot of sense. He might not be handsome and he's totally awkward, but the nice guy prevails. The only problem with him is that frustrating inconsistency in his development. He can touch a girl's chest and stick his tongue down her throat, but he is dead-scared of saying he likes her? That's just dumb.
The rest of the cast are so totally pointless that it makes one wonder why they get any screen time at all. They serve as foils in various regards, but their importance to the audience and even to Yamada herself is so minuscule that it makes the viewer wonder what's the point in her even having friends. There's the typical supportive best friend, the evil ojou-sama, the nice girl, the cool older sister, the more mature younger sister, and the two filler guys who always show up to occupy the classroom scenes. Most of them exist to be roadblocks or green lights for Yamada and Kosuda, but again, their interference remains quite insignificant in the larger scheme of things that it seems arbitrary and pointless that they even try. The ero-gami (Yamada's sex god and Kosuda's... penis pundit) however, totally capture a viewer's attention and have some of the best lines in the series.
B Gata H Kei had the potential to just blow what people perceive about girls who want to have sex out of the water... but it's still written for a male audience. It might be a stretch asking for an ecchi anime to try to be different, but considering that this series went so far as to even have a female protagonist who is the perv, then why stop there? For every two steps it marches forward, it seems like it's pushed one step back. The romantic dilemmas just end up being frustrating. The sexual problems, however, end up being hilarious, and that is the second saving grace of the series. The first being its unsuccessful attempts to be totally different from what one normally sees.
I mentioned earlier that B Gata H Kei was risqué, but not risky, and there's a reason for that. For all it does in trying to push the envelope, it seems dead scared of really trying to be dissimilar from other ecchi series. To be truly risky, the anime should have dealt with Yamada and Kosuda's budding sexuality in less of a "Haha, but it's a joke, see? Not to worry!" manner. The slapstick and light-heartedness is fine, in fact, it is more than welcome. Yet considering the subject matter, if this was handled differently it could have been a seriously good and insightful (not to mention, true-to-life) depiction about how teenagers deal with sex. It doesn't so much walk across hot coals taking solid steps as it guns right across them on tiptoes. Think about that for a minute.
It COULD have been a great romantic-comedy series about a guy and a girl who want to have sex with one another just absolutely failing or messing up. Their differences in temperaments and personalities and their similarities in being totally incompetent and insecure would have made for excellent conflict chemistry. But all that it "could have been" aside, the anime manages to be amusing and sometimes dead hilarious at points. As far as ecchi goes, it pushes boundaries but does not quite cross them.
Unless this is your first ecchi anime, then the kind of situations are just so commonplace that they can barely count as extraordinarily different (except whenever Kosuda gets boners. Also, a handful of the cast are admittedly non-virgins-- that's something you rarely see talked about in these kinds of anime as well). It just is a bit different since the protagonist is a girl, and not a guy, and the aim of said protagonist is to get laid (and funny enough, despite most anime being hyper-sexual, they never seem to properly address the issue of actual sex at all).
When the story is just being itself, it manages to be very funny. Girls talking about losing their virginities or imagining that what guys do in a bathhouse is compare dick sizes-- that sort of thing makes the series just work well, because it takes such a open, direct attitude towards sex and sexuality. Teenage boys and girls are sexually active or (woefully to most of them) inactive-- there's no getting around that or hiding it. Their "troubles" and concerns over their sex lives at that point in time is something the anime attempts to cover, and when it does, it does it well, with comic tones and good humour. It's when it slips back into being a typical ecchi rom-com that it disappoints. It isn't unfunny. It's just so disappointing that you cannot really enjoy it completely as it had the potential to comically address an issue that is never really dealt with in anime: female sexuality. Well, you may be disappointed if you're a viewer expecting something more from this series. If you just want mind-in-the-gutter jokes and a romping good time, you can get that too.
For anyone who watches this and actually thinks for a bit, all this show mostly serves to do is point out a ton of double standards in not only the anime world, but the real one as well. While watching it, I couldn't help but wonder how this series would be regarded if it really was about Yamada just using Kosuda to fulfil her goal. It's not acceptable if a girl wants to be horny and do it with whatever guy or however many guys she wants. It's totally okay if she is a total horndog over one guy, though. Still, as far as leads go, Yamada still makes one refreshing exception to the norm, and as far as ecchi goes, B Gata H Kei bends and plays with the conventional without ever breaking away from it.
Then again, what am I talking about-- nobody watches ecchi and THINKS about it.
